Even a natural salesperson can struggle to keep others on a sales team focused and motivated over time. Whether you manage sales by instinct or with a closely monitored and regimented process, the right data can help you keep your team on track for success.
The sales funnel is a tried and true method for tracking the effectiveness of your sales process and team, but what data you use to “form” the funnel can make a big difference in the usefulness of this sales management tool.
Leads are the lifeblood of sales and splitting the measurement of leads into categories can help make this data more meaningful as you move further down the funnel. While total leads can be a great number to motivate with, looking at new leads per month can keep a team from “coasting” after hitting a total leads goal. Adding a category for “qualified leads” can also help improve the overall quality of all leads as tracking the percent of leads that turn into qualified leads can encourage the team to focus on quality rather than quantity.
For manufacturing sales, the next stage of the funnel is usually request for proposals (RFPs) and submitted bids. Rather than track only these two numbers, consider also monitoring the percent of qualified leads to RFPs and percent of bids that produce a sale. Getting the team looking beyond producing leads to seeing the progression from lead to sale will give more weight to every stage of the sales process.
The end of the funnel (sales) can also be divided to provide more feedback to the team. Besides looking at the average amount of sales, tracking on-time delivery could help determine if there are issues in the RFP/bidding process causing missed delivery dates or if unrealized efficiencies could allow you to promise even faster delivery to gain more sales. Finally, measuring customer satisfaction and the percent of new customers that order again can help make sure that short term sales aren’t being made in a way that hurts long term growth.
Having these metrics is a great start but making them visible to all members of the team at all times will make the biggest impact on performance. Consider putting up a monitor in a common area where these metrics are displayed. Connecting the screen to a live data feed can increase the impact as the team can celebrate individual and team “wins” at any stage of the funnel. Be sure to keep the calculation of each metric open and transparent to keep trust in the data strong.
Need help bringing sales data into the open? Triple Helix specializes in helping companies more effectively organize, access, and analyze the data they generate and collect. Contact us for a no-obligation consultation to learn more about how we can help you use data to motivate your sales team.
